Martin Wisse, Author at Martin's Booklog

A Night in the Lonesome October — Roger Zelazny

Published on November 2, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of A Night in the Lonesome October

A Night in the Lonesome October
Roger Zelazny
Gahan Wilson (illustrator)
280 pages
published in 1993

A Night in the Lonesome October is a special book: except for the various collaborations he did with Robert Sheckley and others, it was the last novel written by Roger Zelazny before his death two years later. It was also a return to form. Zelazny had been one of the more interesting writers to emerge from American New Wave science fiction back in the sixties and had been a steady Hugo and Nebula nominee and winner in the sixties and seventies. the latter half of the eighties he had been mostly concerned with writing the second, lesser Amber cycle while in the nineties he mostly collaborated with other writers. A Night in the Lonesome October was the first new, solo non-Amber Zelazny novel since 1987 and more than that, it was good. As such it became a bit of a fan favourite among the people on the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written, which resulted in a tradition of reading the novel day by day during October each year. This is possible because each chapter is a diary entry devoted to one day in October. I never took part in this, but this year I decided to try it when I wanted to reread it. (UPDATE: liar.)

Set in Late Victorian London, A Night in the Lonesome October is the diary of a dog named Snuff, companion to a man called Jack who has a special knife. Yes, that Jack. He and Snuff are participants in the Game, held every few decades when there’s a full Moon on Halloween, October 31. There are some other, very recognisable characters taking part in this game: a certain Count, the Great Detective (of course), the Good Doctor and his self made man, etc. There are also some less recognisable people taking part in the game, like Crazy Jill and her cat, Graymalk, the latter as close to a friend that Snuff has in the Game. What the Game is about is only gradually made clear, but it is one played between two sides, Openers and Closers. Each player may not know which side the others are on; each player is basically playing on his own until the climax. Therefore there’s room for schemes to be drawn up, alliances to be made and betrayals to happen.

It takes discpline to read A Night in the Lonesome October this way, day by day, especially at the start when the chapters are sort. The tendency to read ahead is great because Zelazny sprinkles enough interesting tidbits around even in these short chapters to tempt you into reading further. Why is a dog keeping a diary and why is it Jack the Ripper’s dog? What are the Things it is guarding in the Mirrors, Circle, Wardrobe and Steamer Trunk? What is it patrolling for and what is it his master is seeking? What does it all mean? Luckily ultimately every question does get answered, albeit often indirectly and in passing. The backstory is only hinted at, never explained. There’s also a little bit of legerdemain going on; not every player is what they seem, nor is every player even in the game. Not everything that looms large in Snuff consciousness as part of his duties is as important as it seems either, especially in those early chapters.

A Night in the Lonesome October at heart is a horror mystery pastiche where a lot of the fun comes from that frisson of recognition as characters wander in and out of the story and understanding their true roles in it. It’s a fun little book that you’d normally read in an hour or two, but reading it spread out like this heightens the anticipation for each chapter. I’m not a patient man and it did take some effort to stick to it, but I’m happy I did. Even if the whole book seems to have written for the truly awful pun in the second to last line of the story…

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd — Peter Verlinden

Published on July 17, 2022Leave a comment

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Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd
Peter Verlinden
177 pages
published in 1995

Published in 1995 after the Rwandan genocide had just ended, Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd tries to explain the context and history in which it took place. The writer, Peter Verlinden is a Belgian journalist who had been covering events in both Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi for several years before. This is not a book about the genocide itself, which is only briefly touched upon in the last few chapters, but an explainer of what made it possible. With only 177 pages to cover the whole history of Rwanda it’s of necessity more of a sketch than a complete picture. As the title Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd (Hutu and Tutsi: Centuries of Conflict) indicates Verlinden argues that the genocide was only the latest in a long line of conflicts between the two ethnic groups and should be seen as such, not as some inexplicable outburst of violence. The genocide, together with what was happening at the same time in former Yugoslavia was what broke the short lived optimism brought on by the end of the Cold War. The idea that now the civilised world (sic) would be able to intervene in conflicts and resolve them was proven wrong by the inability or unwillingness of the UN to stop the genocide as it was happening.

By focusing on the supposed long standing history of ethnic violence in Rwanda you might read this as an excuse for the failure of Belgium and other interested nations to stop the genocide. We saw that line of thinking trotted out a lot during the early years of the Yugoslav civil wars, the idea that Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks just naturally hate each other which you couldn’t do anything about. I was a bit wary of this myself when I first read this, but on the whole I think Verlinden did a good job explaining the circumstances and history driving the genocide without excusing it. Verlinden lets the facts speak for themselves and it’s up to the reader to draw the conclusions and lament the missed opportunities to stop the genocide.

After setting out what the book is about, Verlinden starts with a short history of pre-colonial Rwandaand its first inhabitants, the Twa. These were forest dwellers until the Hutu appeared, some 200-3000 years ago, who brought agriculture with them. The Tutsi arrived later and were pastoralist herders. To say that the Tutsi conquered Rwanda from the Hutu would be wrong, but over the centuries their power did grow, conquering the various Hutu kingdoms. By the nineteenth century it was Tutsi king who ruled most of Rwanda and a Tutsi elite that shared that power, while the Hutu majority were mostly small farmers. A roughyl feudal society, with the Hutu farmers obliged to service their Tutsi masters in various ways through unpaid labour and taxes in kind. At the same time, there were no hard ethnic borders between Hutu and Tutsi. Hutu could become part of the elite even if that was rare and whether you were either depended as much perhaps on your social status as your ethnicity.

As per usual it was the colonisers that fucked things up. First the Germans, then the Belgians took that existing divide between Tutsi and Hutu and codified it as strict ethnicity. For various bullshit racist reasons the Tutsi were elevated as closest to being white and therefore natural leaders, which meant that they got most of the positions of power in government, church and trade. The Belgians especially favoured the Tutsi at first. It was only post-war, in the fifties that this stopped as new generations of Belgian colonial administrators and church officials started instead to take the impoverished Hutu’s side. Belgium never ruled Rwanda directly, but through the existing Tutsi kings, the same way the Germans had done. By now supporting a new generation of Hutu activists and intellectuals demanding a greater share of power, they of course threatened the monarchy and its power structures. Matters came to a head as Rwanda prepared for independence.

An attack on a Hutu politician led to mass attacks on Tutsi leaders and others. The kingdom collapsed, a republic was declared and hundred thousands of Tutsi fled abroad. In Rwanda itself Hutu took over much of Tutsi power and the republic lasted until 1973 when a coup deposed the government and the second republic was proclaimed. Throughout this there were low level tensions between the two groups and occassional outburst of violence, but the real trouble started in 1990, when Tutsi refugees invaded the country to liberate it. That led to several years of civil war and more mass violence against both Tutsi and Hutu, until a peace treaty was signed in early 1994. Everything seemed to be calming down again until the president was killed in an attack on his plane coming back from the peace conference. That was the point at which the genocide started, as at first the Tutsi rebels and sympathetic Tutsi leaders were targeted but quickly escalated to include all Tutsi or ‘Tutsi looking’ people were attacked, as well as moderate Hutu.

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd concludes at this point. At the time of writing Rwanda was still in an uneasy peace, with Tutsi refugees from that first wave of violence at the establishment of the Rwandan Republic returning home after decades, while million others, mostly Hutu had now fled abroad. Many of the Rwandan Tutsi had died in the genocide and their place was taken over by the returnees, who became the new elite. You can see the fires for the next conflict already being stoked while the embers of this one were still glowing, the way Verlinden describes it. In the almost three decades that have been passed since a new genocide fortunately hasn’t happened, but the conflict ia still ongoing, with Hutu refugees in Burundi and the DRC continuing low level guerilla campaigns, while Rwande has intervened in the Congolean civil wars twice as well.

I first read this in 2002 when I got it as an ex-library book and reread it today purely because my eye fell on it. This was a decent primer on the context of the genocide, but these days you might as well read the Wikipedia articles on Rwanda and its history. that of course wasn’t an option in 1995 and barely one in 2002, so I’m grateful to Verlinden for this.

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II — Michael Green

Published on April 30, 2022Leave a comment

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American Tanks & AFVs of World War II
Michael Green
376 pages including notes & index
published in 2014

It’s a fact of life that interest in World War II armour tends to focus on Nazi Germany, with Soviet vehicles perhaps a distant second. Understandable, considering how many interesting and downright strange types made it into production or had at least a prototype created. It’s always tempting to think about what if those potential wunderwaffen had made it into service, whereas the realities of western allied armour are always much more mundane. At least the French and to a lesser extend, the British, had some cool but impractical dead ends available in the early war, but American armour was just relentlessly pragmatic. the answer to any problem encountered seemed to be let’s build more Shermans, rather than creating some new exotic prototype.

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II does nothing to disabuse you of those preconceptions. Yes, there are some what ifs to be found, but in case after case what Michael Green documents here is the ruthless pragmaticism of the US army during world War II. It’s not just that the whole design and procurement process was much more centralised and efficient than that of Nazi Germany — but it certainly helped that there was no Hitler type mucking about on the US side. It’s also that the first instinct was always to look for solutions through modifying existing vehicles, rather than creating new ones. A determination not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good or even good enough. If it worked, why replace it just because there was a better option? That’s the attitude that comes across reading this book.

After a short introduction, American Tanks & AFVs of World War II starts with the development of medium tanks between the wars, culminating in the M3, the first major US tank of World War II, which saw action in North Africa and Italy, as well as the Pacific. This is followed by a long chapter on the development of the ultimate American medium tank, the M4 or Sherman. The Sherman as a tank had always been a bit confusing to me, because its long production and gradual evolution meant there were a confusing number of subvariants and it isn’t always easy to distinguish them. Therefore I appreciate Michael Green’s efforts here to make sense of them all. With the focus on World War II it’s not an entirely complete story of course, as there were numerous post-war variants as well. Not to mention British variants like the infamous Firefly.

The chapters on light and heavy tanks are together only slightly longer than the M4 chapter, which shows its importance. The heavy tank was never that much of a priority to the US army in the war; there never was an equivalent of the Tiger. The 75 or 76 mm armed Sherman was deemed good enough. When there was a demand for a more heavier armoured tank therefore, the Sherman was up-armoured rather than a new tank created. The only tank taken into service that could be classified as heavy would be the M26 Pershing, which only arrived very late in the war. On the light tank front, things were somewhat different. The M3 and M5 series were excellent scout vehicles much used by both the US and the British/Commonwealth, while the M24 was the ultimate WWII light tank, armed with a similar 75mm gun to the Sherman. Again it’s telling that the 37mm armed M3/M5s were kept in service for so long despite their main armament being obsolete almost from their introduction. Their role wasn’t to fight other tanks and the US was never tempted to upgun them just because they could.

Tank destroyers were an important part of US army doctrine, as they were intended to fight enemy tanks rather than leaving it to the tanks themselves. This used to be the tasks of towed anti-tank guns before the war, but the German blitzkrieg put paid to the notion that towed guns could suffice. The first generation of tank destroyers mated existing, often obsolete guns with wheeled vehicles or half tracks. There was e.g. the M3 half track with a World War I vintage 75mm gun that was used in North Africa and Sicily. With the limitations of this sort of design becoming obvious, the next step was to create tank destroyers from existing medium tanks. The M10, M18 and M36 all used the M4 chassis with new turrents and different guns: a 3 inch, 75mm and 90mm respectively as demands for more fire power increased.

The remaining chapters detail the more niche armoured vehicles used in World War II: armoured cars and half tracks, self propelled artillery and tracked landing vehicles. The ruthless pragmatism of the US army really shows through well in these first two categories, with only a very limited number of different armoured cars and half tracks ever taken into series production. The first especially, with only a few types of light armoured cars taken into service and no heavy ones, unlike other armies. With self propelled artillery, there was the same sort of trajectory as with tank destroyers: first using wheeled vehicles before moving on to using the M3 and M4 tank chassis. Tracked landing vehicles were of course mostly used in the Pacific, but also by some of the river crossings in North West Europe late in the war. Again, any improvement here was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, with heavier armament added as needed.

If you want a one shot overview of American tank and armoured vehicle development during World War II, this is an excellent introduction. Plenty of excellent photos and illustrations too help tell the story. Recommended.

The Key to the Bulge — Stephen M. Ruseicki

Published on April 24, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of Snow & Steel

The Key to the Bulge: The Battle for Losheimergraben
Stephen M. Ruseicki
195 pages including notes
published in 1996

A visit to the Bastogne War Museum when I was on a holiday in the Ardennes last October got me interested in the Battle of the Bulge again, as did the series WW2TV did on the campaign in December. Their interview with Peter Caddick-Adams on 10 Facts about the Battle of the Bulge everyone should know led me to read his excellent book on the campaign as a whole. Which in turn whet my appetite for more on the individual battles within the Ardennes Campaign. Military history like all history is fractal after all. You can get a broad overview but if you zoom in you get a lot more detail, new insights. Which is where this book comes in. With Snow and Steel I got the broad strokes of the Ardennes Campaign, with this I got an overview of one of the most important of the early battles in it, one that could be argued determined the outcome of the entire Ardennes Offensive…

That battle was the battle for Losheimergraben, then, as now, a small border crossing between Belgium and Germany, too small even to call a village. In December 1944 this was the front line, the furthest point reached by the great Allied breakout from Normandy earlier that year. Since then the front line in the Ardennes had been largely static; the real fighting continued further up north, in the Netherlands and around Aachen. The Ardennes itself was quiet, an ideal sector to introduces green troops to life at the front and blood them before they got thrown into real battle. Losheimergraben and neighbouring places like Lanzerath were held by such troops, the 394th Infantry Regiment of the 99th infantry Division. It was these troops that would hold out for thirty-six hours against the Sixth Panzer Army starting on the 16th of December, denying it the quick victory it needed to comply to its already impossible schedule.

Hitler’s original idea behind the Ardennes Offensive was to repeat the success of May 1940, when Germany’s panzers broke through the “impenetrable” Ardennes and split the Allied forces in two, ultimately sealing the fate of France and driving the British from the continent. This time his strategic aim was the same, but aimed at seizing Antwerp, denying the Allies its use and splitting up the British and American forces. There are however relatively few passages through these mountains that are usable by armour, of which the so-called Losheim Gap, also used in 1940, is one. Grabbing Losheimergraben, where an east-west road from Germany into Belgium intersects the main north-south road in the Ardennes, was to be the first step in the German drive through this gap. From there the goal was to drive the panzers forward into Bullingen, to Malmedy and beyond to cross the Meuse. Once the Meuse crossings had been made the panzer armies could drive onto Antwerp and victory. But it all depended on seizing those border crossings and seizing them quickly and that would be a job for the infantry.

The American defenses in this crucial sector, as they were all across the Ardennes, were light. Because it was regarded as a quiet sector, not only was it considered an excellent sector to bleed green troops in, it also meant fewer troops were stationed there in the first place. Which meant individual divisions had to defend larger pieces of the front line than was recommended. The 99th Infantry Division therefore had little in the way of reserves, needing all three of its regiments to remain in line to cover the entirety of what it was responsible for. Worse, it was stationed on the border with another army corps, with Lanzerath and the Losheim Gap right on the border, barely covered by any American soldiers. This is the stage on which those initial German attacks happened on the 16th of December. Yet despite being outnumbered and surprised, the inexperienced men of the 394th regiment of the 99th division held out for more than a day against the German onslaught. How was this possible?

As Ruseicki describes it, it’s clear the tenacity and sheer dogged will of these American soldiers to resist played a big role. they may have been green, but they were well trained, their morale was good and they weren’t going to just roll over. Making good use of their defences they held back the enemy as long as they could before withdrawing in good order to a new defensive line. Ultimately they were never broken and the Germans never quite managed to break through, the offensive stalled almost from the start. Looking at it from the German side, it’s clear that they had problems even had their opponents been a pushover. The obsession to keep the offensive a secret meant little preparation and with no reconnaissance allowed, they had no idea what they were walking into. Having soldiers that on the whole turned out to be just as green as the Americans, but far less well trained, didn’t help either. If reading this you are reminded of how Russia’s currently bungling its war on Ukraine, you’re not the only one…

This was an interesting look at one of the opening battles of the Ardennes Offensive. Ruseicki describes the action well without being overtly dramatic. A good example, well explained, of how small scale battles can impact a wider offensive.

Snow & Steel — Peter Caddick-Adams

Published on January 6, 2022Leave a comment

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Snow & Steel: the Battle of the Bulge 1944 – 45
Peter Caddick-Adams
872 pages including notes and index
published in 2014

Nuts!

The story of the Bulge should be familiar. Hitler’s last roll of the dice, an offensive that nobody expected. The goal: to split the western allies apart by reconquering Antwerp. Elite panzers racing through the Ardennes, reliving the glory days of May 1940, expecting little resistance from the outnumbered and inexperienced American forces stationed there. the allied airfoces, grounded by bad weather and unable to come to the rescue. The unexpected resistance and Hitler’s hopes smashed at Bastogne, when after an imperious demand to surrender now the town was surrounded, the commanding American officer responded with a simple “Nuts!”

It’s a great story, a story the town of Bastogne dines out on to this very day. When I was there on holiday last October literally every second shop window had something about the siege in its display. It also has the benefit of being mostly true. But it isn’t the entire truth of the Ardennes Offensive, or Peter Caddick-Adams wouldn’t have needed almost nine hundred pages to tell its story. There were other sieges beside Bastogne, other places where American resistance held up the Nazi attack long enough for it to ultimately fail, other tales of heroism and tragedy to be told. Arguably, one could say that the fate of the offensive had been determined long before Bastogne had even been reached. Similarly, the story didn’t end when the siege of Bastogne was lifted. There was more hard fighting to be done, fighting which lasted into January and February of 1945.

It’s Snow & Steel‘s ambition to tell the entire story of the Battle of the Bulge, knowing full well it’s impossible to do so. As the author himself has admitted, the air war for example is barely covered in this book. Similarly, some important battles are barely touched upon, some phases of the campaign less exhaustively treated than others. What Snow & Steel instead provide is as good as possible an overview of the campaign as a whole, set in context of both what gave birth to it and how it in turn impacted the rest of the war. Not only that, Caddick-Adams also looks at its impact after the war, on the people that fought in it but also those who sought to learn from its lessons. He himself has a background in the (Cold War) UK military and knows from first-hand experience how the Ardennes Offensive was studied to prepare for the expected Soviet attack on West Germany.

The first third of the book therefore is all about establishing the context in which the offensive took place, why it was planned and how it was planned. The conventional idea about the Ardennes Offensive is that Hitler thought it up on September 16th, when he announced it to the commanders who would lead the operation. As Caddick-Adams shows though, Hitler had from almost the start of the fighting in Normandy aimed for a decisive counterattack against the Anglo-American forces landed there, there had been attempts to do so but ultimately it wasn’t until the Germans had been driven out of France and Belgium that there was an opportunity to do so. Once the situation had stabilised, both the target of Antwerp as the Ardennes as the sector to attack through made sense. Antwerp was the closest harbour to the front the Allies had, only recently opened. Without it, supplies needed to come all the way from Normandy and Bretagne again and it was this logistic strain that had stopped Allied progress in the first place. Doing it through the Ardennes, repeating the success of May 1940 made sense both psychological as military. It was a quiet sector, undermanned and with a number of green divisions just arrived in theatre. If it could be done by surprise and if it could count on the absence of Allied air support, the operation had a chance of succeeding, at least in its initial goal, crossing the Meuse.

Not that many of the actual commanders believed that was possible, let alone reaching Antwerp, but this was 1944 and Hitler was in no mood for dissent after having almost been killed in a Wehrmacht plot. A more realistic plan would’ve been to try and encircle the American troops in the Ardennes and at the border with Germany, to try and destroy 15-20 divisions that way to buy time to prepare the defence of Germany, but that was rejected. To be fair, such a success wouldn’t have mattered much, only postponed the inevitable. Only if Hitler’s plan succeeded and had the effect of tearing apart the western allies would Germany have a chance at a negotiated peace. As Caddick-Adams shows, this was an idle hope. Both the goal and the effects it would have were unrealistic. Even getting to the Meuse, basically the start line for the drive to Antwerp would require a miracle, everything going to plan and the Allied responding exactly like Hitler wanted them to. But it didn’t and they didn’t and by the end of the first day it was already clear that it would not work.

Ironically it might have been the paranoid security measures Hitler insisted on to keep the operation a secret that both made it such a surprise to the Allies and led to its ultimate failure. For various reasons, the usual intelligence the Allies relied upon were already less effective now the enemy was in its homeland. No need for encrypted radio broadcasts if you can use your secure telephone lines for example. At the same time, the actual participants in the operation were kept in the dark as long as possible. Initially only the highest commanders of the offensive were in the loop, while the average soldier was only informed just before the offensive started. There was little opportunity therefore for anybody to spill the secret, but it also meant the troops were ill prepared for the actual fight. Worse, with Hitler forbidding reconnaissance efforts or anything that could give away the game, the Germans were also much less informed about the Allied positions and strengths than you would’ve wanted to be.

When it comes to the actual battle, it becomes clear almost from the start that it would fail. Initial resistance is much harder than the Germans realised and the highly optimistic targets for the first day are reached almost nowhere. Worse, the Allied response is much quicker than Hitler had anticipated. Much of the credit for that Caddick-Adams gives to Eisenhouwer, who acted decisively from day one to get reinforcements to the front and to get the shoulders of the offensive stabilised in order to counter attack. With the failure to get through the Ardennes as quickly as was needed to be able to cross the Meuse and start the true offensive, the fighting became a war of attrition which the Germans would always lose. Ultimately it set the Allies’ plans for the invasion of Germany back a couple of months, but in return many of the elite troops and weapons they would’ve faced otherwise had already been destroyed in the Bulge.

I started reading this book because I went on holiday to the Ardennes with my family, visiting the Bastogne War Museum there, but also because of the excellent series of Battle of the Bulge programmes the Youtube channel WW2TV ran in early December. If you want to get a taste of Peter Caddick-Adams writing, then watch the presentation he did for that channel on 10 Facts about the Battle of the Bulge everyone should know. I really like the methological way Caddick-Adams sets out his vision on the Offensive and why it was doomed to failure in this book and if you want a one volume overview of the campaign this is the one to get. I would however recommend that you keep both Wikipedia and Google Maps handy to look up things, because it can be a bit confusing at times. Viewing the battlefields on Google Maps gives a better grasps at the geography and flow of the battles, while Wikipedia is handy to look up some of the less explained details.